side by side; With Company leading the way, relationships take center stage, writes Adam Green.

Byline: Adam Green

Like second marriages, theater represents, to borrow from Samuel Johnson, the triumph of hope over experience. This month, as voters in several states head to the polls to decide the meaning of marriage, New York audiences will be heading to stages, on- and Off-Broadway, where they may find their hope rewarded by a fresh batch of productions that explore the vicissitudes of wedded bliss.

First down the aisle is John Doyle's revival of Company, the rueful 1970 Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical comedy about searching for connection and running from commitment in Manhattan. Last season, Doyle made an electrifying, and Tony-winning, Broadway debut with his incisive, cut-to-the-bone staging of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, whose small cast doubled as the show's orchestra. "The bottom line for me is, if you have an actor with a cello in his hands, you have no choice but to suspend your disbelief," Doyle says.

With its modernist sensibility, Company is a natural fit for his approach. In this sleekly designed production, a smash last season at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park, the entire chamber ensemble of spouses and lovers remains onstage for the whole show ("You really get why it's called Company," Doyle says). And each of them plays an instrument-alone, in couples, as part of a ragtag marching band-except for the show's central figure, Bobby, a perennially single third wheel about to turn 35, who watches from the sidelines, unable to join the parade of life. In a series of sharp vignettes, Bobby examines the messy lives of "these good and crazy people, my married friends" as he lurches toward intimacy. Such songs as "Sorry-Grateful," "Marry Me a Little," and "Someone Is Waiting," in which Bobby imagines his perfect woman as "a Susan sort of Sarah, a Jennyish Joanne," confirm Sondheim as the master of making ambivalence sing.

Complaints that Bobby can be something of a cipher should be answered by the casting of the passionate Cuban-American actor Raul Esparza, who, having starred in musicals great (Sunday in the Park with George) and not so (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), seems poised to become a star. At the show's climax, Bobby, after two hours of refusing to pick up an instrument, is ready to confront a piano center stage and accompany himself as he sings "Being Alive." Esparza says, "The biggest act of bravery, both for Bobby and for me as an actor, is sitting down and starting to play. It's such a visceral experience-the emotions are coming from your back and flowing through your fingers. I get very nervous, and my hands sweat like a fool. And that's exactly where Bobby is-all that fear and all that tension, released into finally making a sound for himself. Out of context, it's that famous Sondheim showstopper, but in the context of the show, it breaks your heart."

A confirmed bachelor is also at the center of Regrets Only, Paul Rudnick's fizzy new comedy of manners, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. David Rasche and Christine Baranski are Jack and Tibby McCullough, an Upper East Side couple with a wacky Jewish maid and a Bridezilla daughter, and George Grizzard is their best pal, Hank Hadley, an elegant fashion designer (modeled after Bill Blass), still in mourning for his longtime companion. When Jack agrees to help the president craft an "ironclad definition of legal marriage," the normally unflappable Hank borrows a page from ...